The wind atop the Skyfire Citadel did not howl. It whispered—like a breath caught in the throat of the world. The sky was bruised with stormlight, the stars half-swallowed by black fire that crawled across the firmament like spilled ink. And at the edge of it all, standing where heaven and war had once met, was him.
He didn't have a name anymore. Not one they dared speak.
He had worn a hundred. Burned through ten thousand titles. The Flamebearer. The Lord of Echoes. The Oathbreaker. The Last Light. The God Who Gave Too Much. Now he stood alone, barefoot on shattered obsidian, a single breath away from the gods who came to kill him.
They were already here. Circling. Watching.
He felt their weight like gravity. Old gods with stone eyes. Cold gods with golden spears. Whispering gods whose names bled from memory. He knew each of them. Had eaten with them. Bled with them. Saved them. And now, as thunder clawed at the sky, he knew what they came to do.
He smiled anyway.
His body ached in ways the divine should never feel. The wound on his side hadn't healed, not since he gave his flame to the last mortal tribe on the edge of the dying world. It flickered behind his ribs like a dying candle.
They had warned him. Mortal souls weren't meant to bear it. Not the Flame. Not the truth.
But he had done it anyway.
"Prometheus," said the woman in white. Not a name. A curse.
He turned. She was unchanged, beautiful and hollow. Her crown of moonlight flickered above her brow like a lie half-believed.
"You came in person," he said.
"We owed you that much."
He looked past her—to Odin, silent as the grave. To Ra, face unreadable. To the boy-faced god of the Eastern skies, his eyes like polished knives. None of them met his gaze.
"Loyalty burns fast in the halls of the divine," he muttered.
Ra shifted. Odin didn't.
"You gave fire to mortals," said the boy-faced god.
"I gave them a choice."
"You broke the pact."
"The pact was a cage."
A silence stretched. Long. Endless. Then—
"You know why we're here."
He did. He had known for months.
They couldn't kill him quickly. That would make him a martyr. They needed to erase him. Remove him from story, from memory, from fate itself.
But he had prepared.
He reached into his chest. Not with hands, but with thought—like pulling open a curtain. There, burning faintly, was the last shard of the Soul Mirror. The cheat they never discovered. Not truly. A fragment that let him reflect what should have been final.
"I'll make it easy," he said. "Let's get on with it."
And he stepped forward.
The first blow wasn't a sword. It was a word. Spoken by the woman in white. A word of forgetting.
He staggered.
Not because of the pain—but because it worked.
He felt pieces of himself crumble. Names. Places. Faces. The temple by the river. The laughter of the girl he once loved. The child he failed to save. Each one erased like chalk beneath a storm.
"No," he breathed.
A second word struck him. This one from Ra. A word of unmaking. Of silence. His powers peeled away, layer by layer. The flame inside him screamed.
Then came Odin. No word. Just the axe.
It fell like thunder.
It didn't break his body. It shattered his soul.
The ground rushed up.
He felt his Flame Echo shriek. He felt it die. He felt his Domain collapse into ash. And as he fell, time folded. Gravity bent. The gods turned away, their job done.
He should have vanished.
But the Mirror held.
Just a flicker. A crack. A single spark—pressed deep into the marrow of fate.
He saw a forest. Metal towers. Noise and rain.
And a boy.
Breathing fire into music.
Somewhere else.
On Earth, where the sky had never cracked, where gods were bedtime stories and history was written by fools, a boy jolted upright in the middle of the night.
His heart was on fire.
He didn't know his name.
Not the real one.
But he remembered a scream that broke the sky.
And a voice—his own—whispering:
"This time, I won't share the flame. I'll burn the world with it."
And then came the ache.
It wasn't pain like a pulled muscle or a bruise. It was deeper—older. Like a memory of being torn in half. The boy clutched his chest, gasping. His fingertips burned.
No, not burned. Glowed.
He looked at his hand. Lines were glowing beneath the skin—faint, like veins of fire written in a forgotten language. They pulsed in sets of seven.
Three pulses.
A pause.
Then seven more.
He didn't know what it meant. But it made his breath catch.
He stumbled to the bathroom, flicked on the light. The mirror showed a face he didn't recognize—not really. Brown eyes. Dark hair. Nothing strange. But the eyes… they felt wrong.
Like someone else was looking back.
His name was—
He didn't know. He thought he did. But the more he tried to say it, the more it frayed.
There was only the voice again.
"This time, we burn it all."
He gripped the sink.
Behind him, the light flickered. The bulb hummed. Then—pop. It blew.
Darkness.
He felt something move in the hallway. Not footsteps. A shift in weight. The air changed. Denser.
He turned slowly.
And saw it.
A silhouette. Shadow-bound. Standing at the edge of the hallway like a stain that hadn't been there before.
It tilted its head.
"Who are you?" the boy whispered.
The thing didn't answer.
But it smiled.
And in that moment, the boy remembered fire.
Not warmth. Not comfort.
Destruction. Wrath. Power without chains.
The mirror inside him flickered. A single, ancient word etched across the soul.
Prometheus.
He didn't understand it.
But somewhere deep inside, something did.
And it had just woken up.